Digital technologies have altered how people and businesses interact. The potential for dislocation from ongoing digital transformation has created unprecedented levels of C-suite discussion. The decisive market leaders have heeded the warnings and taken bold actions.

That said, if you’re one of those Chief Technology Officers (CTO) that previously responded to this scenario by making small incremental adjustments to your IT agenda, then you’re potentially at risk. Any relief from those prior tweaks tend to be short lived. The same issues will likely resurface.

An Introduction to Digital ReinventionBack in 2013, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) introduced the concept of ‘Digital Reinvention.’ Why is that concept noteworthy? Markets had evolved from organizational centricity, in which manufacturers and service providers defined a predictable state, into a radically different environment described as the everyone-to-everyone (E2E) economy.

The E2E economy has four distinct characteristics, which are now more important since the original IBM study was published. E2E is orchestrated, and based on open ecosystems which are collaborative and inclusive. Orchestration reflects coordination, arrangement and management of complex commercial environments.

Customer Experience-Based InnovationEmerging technologies are expanding customer influence. A new generation of tech savvy customers demand more sophisticated and tailored experiences. According to a recent global survey of executives focusing on emerging business ecosystems, 54 percent believe customer buying behavior is shifting from a products- and/or services-based to an experience-based approach.

Seventy-one percent of global CEOs are now intent on treating customers as individuals rather than market segments -- that’s a 29 percent growth in only two years. And, 81 percent of global CEOs say they want to apply technology to develop stronger customer relationships.

These benefits arise even if fulfillment of the experience involves direct provision of products and services, or orchestration of products or services from partner organizations by way of a business ecosystem. The most successful digitally reinvented businesses establish a platform of engagement for their customers -- acting as enabler, conduit and partner.

Pathway to Digital ReinventionAccording to the IBM IBV assessment, to succeed in this disruptive environment, organizations must offer compelling new experiences, establish new focus, build new expertise, devise new ways of working and embrace the digital drivers.

Pursue a new focus -- Leading businesses will develop new ways of realizing and monetizing value and spawn new business models, new forms of financing and better, more holistic ways of conducting risk assessments. Leaders will also engage the market in deeper, more compelling ways. They will create strategies and execution plans to deliver deep, contextual, compelling experiences, and find new ways to monetize customer Interactions.

Build new expertise -- Leading businesses will digitize products, services and processes that help them redefine the customer experience. They will augment these steps by applying predictive analytics, cognitive computing, the Internet of Things and automation to create a fully integrated, flexible and agile operational environment necessary to support and enable deep experiences.

Establish new ways of working -- Leading businesses identify, retain and build the right talent needed to create and sustain a digital organization. The most successful among these take measures to create and perpetuate an innovation-infused culture incorporating design thinking, agile working and fearless experimentation.

Leaders contextualize organizational priorities within business ecosystems, seeking new forms of partnering and new ways to build value within overall systems of engagement. They think deeply and strategically about how customer priorities might evolve, seeking opportunities to create engagement platforms to the benefit of their customers, their partners and themselves.

Embrace digital drivers -- Leading businesses combine open innovations to create organizations that can build the deep, compelling experiences customers desire. Rather than incrementalism, Digital Reinvention provides a path for visionary organizations to adopt an experience-first approach to planning, employing the strengths of ecosystem partners to create experiences that are truly unique.

Study Conclusion: Reinventing the FutureDigital technologies have redefined how people live, work and play. Pervasive technology is already changing traditional industry structures and economics and is reinterpreting what it means to be a customer and a citizen within the Global Networked Economy.

To thrive in a rapidly changing business environment, the most successful organizations will offer compelling new experiences, establish new focus, build new expertise and devise new ways of working -- all based upon a foundation of the latest digital drivers.

With more than 30 Kubernetes solutions in the marketplace, it's tempting to think Kubernetes and the vendor ecosystem has solved the problem of operationalizing containers at scale or of automatically managing the elasticity of the underlying infrastructure that these solutions need to be truly scalable. Far from it. There are at least six major pain points that companies experience when they try to deploy and run Kubernetes in their complex environments. In this presentation, the speaker will detail these pain points and explain how cloud can address them.

The deluge of IoT sensor data collected from connected devices and the powerful AI required to make that data actionable are giving rise to a hybrid ecosystem in which cloud, on-prem and edge processes become interweaved. Attendees will learn how emerging composable infrastructure solutions deliver the adaptive architecture needed to manage this new data reality. Machine learning algorithms can better anticipate data storms and automate resources to support surges, including fully scalable GPU-centric compute for the most data-intensive applications. Hyperconverged systems already in place can be revitalized with vendor-agnostic, PCIe-deployed, disaggregated approach to composable, maximizing the value of previous investments.

When building large, cloud-based applications that operate at a high scale, it's important to maintain a high availability and resilience to failures. In order to do that, you must be tolerant of failures, even in light of failures in other areas of your application. "Fly two mistakes high" is an old adage in the radio control airplane hobby. It means, fly high enough so that if you make a mistake, you can continue flying with room to still make mistakes.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Lee Atchison, Principal Cloud Architect and Advocate at New Relic, discussed how this same philosophy can be applied to highly scaled applications, and can dramatically increase your resilience to failure.

Machine learning has taken residence at our cities' cores and now we can finally have "smart cities." Cities are a collection of buildings made to provide the structure and safety necessary for people to function, create and survive. Buildings are a pool of ever-changing performance data from large automated systems such as heating and cooling to the people that live and work within them. Through machine learning, buildings can optimize performance, reduce costs, and improve occupant comfort by sharing information within the building and with outside city infrastructure via real time shared cloud capabilities.

As Cybric's Chief Technology Officer, Mike D. Kail is responsible for the strategic vision and technical direction of the platform. Prior to founding Cybric, Mike was Yahoo's CIO and SVP of Infrastructure, where he led the IT and Data Center functions for the company. He has more than 24 years of IT Operations experience with a focus on highly-scalable architectures.

As Cybric's Chief Technology Officer, Mike D. Kail is responsible for the strategic vision and technical direction of the platform. Prior to founding Cybric, Mike was Yahoo's CIO and SVP of Infrastructure, where he led the IT and Data Center functions for the company. He has more than 24 years of IT Operations experience with a focus on highly-scalable architectures.

The explosion of new web/cloud/IoT-based applications and the data they generate are transforming our world right before our eyes. In this rush to adopt these new technologies, organizations are often ignoring fundamental questions concerning who owns the data and failing to ask for permission to conduct invasive surveillance of their customers. Organizations that are not transparent about how their systems gather data telemetry without offering shared data ownership risk product rejection, regulatory scrutiny and increasing consumer lack of trust in technology in general.

René Bostic is the Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America. Enjoying her career with IBM during the modern millennial technological era, she is an expert in cloud computing, DevOps and emerging cloud technologies such as Blockchain. Her strengths and core competencies include a proven record of accomplishments in consensus building at all levels to assess, plan, and implement enterprise and cloud computing solutions.
René is a member of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and a member of the Society of Information Management (SIM) Atlanta Chapter. She received a Business and Ec...

May. 16, 2018 12:30 PM EDT Reads: 3,183

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SDN covers the use of software to create networks that can be reconfigured quickly and centrally without the need for any costly or time-consuming adjustment of individual routers and switches.

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.